There are people that are underestimating this disease but not stepping outside of your house for 5 months is way overboard. Perhaps the author intended to say he hasn’t left his property in 5 months which is more reasonable but if you literally aren’t going outside in your own yard because of COVID, you are crazy.
Consider he may have a better handle on risks, especially long term survival risks (check out the long term survivor risks that surfaced with SARs), than most people. Also he's been a Harvard Professor since forever, so I imagine he has quite a nice house.
/s
I have yet to see a programmer write code that manifests an artifact as effective, adaptable, and robust as a human body.
Disclaimer: I have a love/hate relationship with sarcasm myself!
Sort of like software developers turning neurotic about minor glitches because, not despite of their knowledge
My father is over that age, and he's also near Atlanta, but isolated in a suburban home, wears a mask, gets food from other family members that are being very careful, etc.
I'm glad he's at least in a place where he can get outside (in his yard). Being in an apartment building and never getting out sounds like prison.
(I should clarify - he may have good reasons to stay inside for 5 months and I think that's anybody's prerogative to decide their risk tolerance wrt covid.
But for most people that's absolutely insane, essentially agoraphobic.
I've seen evidence some otherwise completely healthy people are long-haul locked inside their small apartment and it's sad to see.)
“ reported that as many as one-third of patients who test positive for covid-19 but are never hospitalized battle symptoms for weeks or even months after contracting the virus. “I think that people are highly underestimating this disease,” Church says.“
and sometimes you're too close to the issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students%27_disease
IMO you can't be "overboard." I've been in self-quarantine since March and have left my property exactly twice, over a month ago, when my dog needed surgery.
Yesterday we tested positive.
There are people who have flown on flights with actively infectious cases of Covid. Following hygiene practices, none of the passengers got infected.
Symptoms (or the lack thereof) are not an indicator of whether or not someone has contracted it.
OP has stated they've left their home twice in the past 5 months, the last time 4 weeks ago and they just tested positive.
The chance of them being an asymptomatic carrier is actually pretty low, otherwise we wouldn't be doing 14 day quarantines.
Is it possible OP is a rare edge case? Sure. But not likely.
I'm thinking this may be true. Dr. John Campbell has a fantastic video[1] that suggests we may be overlooking one possible symptom in otherwise asymptomatic populations: Skin rashes. That doesn't mean, of course, that everyone gets skin rashes with COVID-19, but it appears that it may be an early clinical feature of the disease even in people who are otherwise spared the worst.
The theory is one may find detectable RNA fragments, without the person truly having an active infection (I.e. they’ve already recovered).
There is also just human error with sample handling, contamination, etc.
https://www.wsmv.com/news/mt-juliet-man-says-even-with-no-te...
It's sometimes someone driving to a testing site and then leaving the line. If that's true and they're not rechecking your personal information at the swab, it's unsettling because then everyone's results are now off-by-one (or more).
There are other cases where people have been told they have COVID after never even having been in line for a test. Not that they might have it via contact tracing, but that they tested positive from a test they never took (or got in line for).
Not to mention there was the cast of a Goat and an Orange testing positive in Tanzania:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/coronavirus-...
What is going on with these tests?
The actual incidence of this kind of error is incredibly small.
People doing deliveries are probably the most at risk right now, and the outside of deliveries, the plastic bags, I always treat them as if they are full of Covid-19.
And I'm sure most people don't go to restaurants any more, but they get food deliveries all the time.
I cook instead. One risk less.
I mean, if you group 10 samples from a test center, what's the probability of one of them being positive? Isn't it close to 1.0?
The latter seems like it would be far more common than the former.
I'll quote some people smarter than me.
“In the beginning, our model for understanding this infection was to treat it like another respiratory virus like influenza,” said John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. “I think one of the most unfortunate and interesting things about this virus is that its interaction with us is actually far more complicated than that.”
"This virus is unusual and it's hard not to take a step back and not be impressed by how many manifestations it has on the human body" author of https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0968-3
The "majority" (87%) still experience symptoms months later https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768351 including scar tissue on the heart and lungs, blood clots, up to 37% experience acute kidney injury.
This is not the flu, but if it sounds too scary to believe, it probably is when it comes to COVID.
You are free to infer what you want from the lack of data about the other cases which the paper did not cover, but that is not how i interact with science. A complete lack of data should never be the basis of your hypothesis.
In most countries with successful quarantines, these people are regulated and tested, but for us it is kind of the opposite. These are people paid hourly and highly dependent upon a paycheck. It is an incentivized super-spreader paradigm if you think about it.
That's a perfectly sensible approach if you're in charge of a school or a retail business. There's a cost vs benefit and lost opportunity calculation.
In our personal lives, taking 1-3 minutes to wipe down all groceries isn't going to cause you to suddenly forget wearing a mask or staying home as much as possible, unless you have extremely bad executive functioning.
The hardest part is that I was in New Zealand for the previous 7 months and decided to leave when the US announced they were closing borders (and forgot to mention they would remain open for citizens)
Hope you get well soon!
It is broken and we were just backpacking through southern hemisphere summer so we haven't bothered.
Surely it could be both.
I'm not so sure. People are eating in restaurants with "outdoor" dining that consists of only one open wall out of four. They are going to pools, and gyms, and the beach, all without masks. This kind of thing isn't safe.
Given that the virus seems to generate harder symptoms for men, and some young people have died, and the number of cases are still in exponential growth, I see no reason not to avoid the risk.
In my opinion, if you choose to get infected, you are crazy.
Have gone in the yard though.
Very risk averse.
Why? There's no magic number for risk. The more you isolate the fewer transmission events you see. The more people willing to do that, the faster the spread will stop.
I mean... just look at the virus curves in the rest of the US. We're CLEARLY not staying home enough. We need more people "going overboard", not less.
Stay home.
For example in Norway, you don't have to isolate. The numbers are relatively low, the clusters are well tracked, the few travelers from dangerous countries like USA have quarantines. You still have to be careful of course.
I've seen this line of thinking a few times, usually in reference to self-quarantine and/or wearing a mask, and it doesn't really make any sense to me. This particular virus being novel and so contagious means there's really no hope of stopping its spread, right? It seems the best we can hope for is to slow it down enough that our healthcare system is able to care for the acute cases properly while also concurrently tending the needs of other illnesses/injuries.
I think the messaging around why we are quarantining and wearing masks has been very confusing and its leading people to hope for things that are literally not possible at this point and encouraging unsustainable behavior.
You might be able to write off a year of staying in your home if you believe the following years will allow a return to normal, but is every high risk person prepared to spend the rest of their lives in their current housing? I'm finding way too many people who seem to think this is going to "be over soon" if the general public does a better job following the guidelines but that doesn't seem realistic. It seems much more likely we're going to see this thing continue for years (3+) to come.
How do you explain the infection rates in Japan, Korea, or Germany, which were never high and remain very low. Or France, Italy or Spain, which were VERY high and have since been well contained?
Yes, we can keep this under control. It takes discipline and care, and some amount of sacrifice. But it can be done. We're just doing it badly.
But no, not "everyone" needs to literally stay home forever. Wear a mask. Stay 2m from other human beings. Stay outside. In particular avoid "static" indoor environments like restaurants (or bars, cruise ships, theaters, etc...) which have been the source of the bulk of local outbreaks. Work from home as much as possible.
Don't write it off as impossible to contain when it's not. We can do much better, and there are tens (or maybe hundreds) of thousands of lives that can be preserved still.
That being said, there's a non-trivial amount of people, particularly vocal celebrities, who have posted things like "If you idiots wore masks this would be over already" (Seth MacFarlane). Then we've got the other commenters on this post who note they have only left their house twice in the past 6 months. Many of these people believe we are only a few "stubborn people being compliant" away from eliminating the threat, which is just patently untrue. It's here to stay.
Who's bossing around anyone? I responded to someone saying "you don't have to stay home" with "you should stay home". I'm just a random guy on the internet.
So, to clarify: will you please stay home?
> you are able to avoid the virus entirely by just taking your own advice.
I'm trying. But no, I can't avoid all interaction like this guy did. Some people can't avoid interaction at all (i.e. they have "essential" jobs they need to be at in person). All of us need to help.
Your attitude, frankly, is precisely why the US is, well, shitting the bed with this virus when almost literally everyone else in the developed world has it contained.
I did help - by nearly dying. I had to receive emergency care for appendicitis and could not get anywhere in my region to perform the appendectomy because my city decided to shut down all elective surgeries. Why? So that 32,000 morbidly obese octogenarians could die with the best-possible PR spin, which spared the state and their hospital administration staff of any wrongdoing.
I developed sepsis and nearly died as a result. I am a healthy 30 year old who went through a common medical emergency with a more than apparent, streamlined medical solution. I was denied basic care and decency, like many people were, because of all this garbage about there being a pandemic.
I don't care what you say - any 30 year old's life is more valuable than your grandparent bound to a nursing home. So, no, fuck that - I will not stay home. I will fight for my ability to stay alive, thank you very much. If a pandemic can bring down a country simply by forcing people to stay home, we deserve to lose everything we've built towards. I posit instead, however, that things would be just fine - and just the way they are right now - if we completely ignored your ridiculously generalized request.
If everybody just said "fuck it" and went outside, hospitals would be far more clogged. It's unlikely you'd be telling us about your experience with appendicitis. That's why people are saying we should avoid unnecessarily going outside--so the next person with appendicitis can get immediate care. Ignoring the request is going to result in more deaths, which we can already see in the absolute, unparalleled disaster that is America where people are saying "who cares go outside." The deaths are still rising fast, while other developed countries are doing far better now than they have been in months.
Either you didn't read what I wrote, or you are being extremely disingenuous. The medical systems of NYC are ALWAYS overwhelmed. Why on earth would you suggest otherwise? What you describe here is exactly what we did in NYC, and none of those outcomes are what happened.
> The deaths are still rising fast, while other developed countries are doing far better now than they have been in months.
Oh go on, tell me about all those tiny little European countries and how it's their regulatory systems - not their puny surface areas - that make this the case.
And I still don't see your point. YES, you should be leaving your house to get emergency medical care. Why does that mean you shouldn't stay home for routine stuff where practical?
All of them. We got the same results everywhere we tried. And of course, it doesn't make any sense. What about shutting down the hospitals to everything except for one sort of ICU procedure, then under-staffing those ICUs makes any sense?
> you should be leaving your house to get emergency medical care. Why does that mean you shouldn't stay home for routine stuff where practical?
I stayed home after I was denied emergency medical care. I had to stay barely alive through an at-home visiting nurses service where I had terrible antibiotics fed into my veins multiple times per day. It was a traumatic experience for everyone involved and it was totally, completely unnecessary. I was denied this treatment, why? Because I might catch COVID-19, or give it to somebody else. But oh, don't worry about the fact that you have sepsis! Just sleep it off, we have old folks we need to kill with more intubations.
The authorities have no idea what is practical, what is routine, or what is appropriate. If they did, I would have had my surgery and not be dealing with the ongoing consequences of waiting as long as they made me wait.
I'm sure it makes sense to you somehow, but it's not remotely rational.
"Staying home" is not what caused the situation you describe, anyway. You're just drawing an irrelevant association which you're responding to emotionally.
> So that 32,000 morbidly obese octogenarians could die with the best-possible PR spin
You have to know that that characterization isn't accurate. You chose a group who you think deserve to die more than you do, which says a lot about your degree of selfishness. But many other people that aren't in that group have also died. What about them? Sounds like you're trying to fool yourself to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Yes, it is. I had to stay home instead of receiving emergency surgery for a routine medical issue because the hospital did not want to pull the surgeon away from the ICU. They pawned me off onto "essential worker" nurses who visited my home as part of a visiting nurse service, exposing me to far more COVID-19 than had I just received the damn surgery in the first place. And that's what caused me to develop sepsis - having heavy IV medications thrown at me instead of just doing the proper thing. Lawsuit is forthcoming.
> You have to know that that characterization isn't accurate.
That's the only characterization that we KNOW is accurate. That's what happened in NYC. Cuomo's response was hailed as the gold standard of COVID-19 responses. And those results were the celebrated ones, the ones to recreate across the country.
You know what Manhattan looks like today because of how seriously we took this dumb pandemic? [0] Yeah, real civilized.
Some people don't realize just how uncivilized NYC is without all the people walking around outside, making the grime, dysfunction, inefficiency, and disorder look acceptable and reasonable.